It seems like Zelda games have changed forever

Tuesday’s biggest shock The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom The reveal, of course, was that Princess Zelda will be the playable protagonist. The second biggest shock was that the game even exists and is coming out in three months.

The third biggest shock took a little longer to register, but it’s potentially an even bigger deal: Echoes of wisdom is a clear indication that Nintendo has turned its back on traditional Zelda game design for good.

Tradition is of great importance to the Legend of Zelda series. This series of games has essentially told and retold the same story over and over again over the course of 38 Earth years (and millennia on Hyrule). Likewise, the game design has changed and shifted within strict boundaries as it observed the well-worn rituals of Zelda.

For decades, each game unfolded in a gradual, non-linear, but carefully prescribed manner, as the player unlocked new tools that fit like keys into the map’s many locks and used them to find the solutions to complicated puzzles. In the first review of a Zelda game I wrote – I think it was for The Minish cap, in 2004 – I described the games as “clockwork fairytales,” meaning they worked like beautiful, precise machines that the player could place themselves inside. And they stayed that way – until 2017.

Breath of the wild tore up the Zelda rulebook. It gave players all the important tools at the start of the game and let them explore the map in any direction, tackling the challenges in any order. Through systems like weapon durability, weather, stamina, and cooking, it also added many variables that would keep players on their toes and encourage improvisation.

Then 2023 Tears of the Kingdom boosted this approach with a handful of features that seemed designed not to disrupt the game design, but to completely destroy it. Ultrahand allows players to build their own furniture, buildings, vehicles and powered structures. Fuse links almost every single object in the game to the weapon system. Rewind allows players to send individual objects back in time. And Ascend – which started life as a debugging tool for developers – is almost a literal cheat, a get-out-of-jail-free card.

With these two open world games Tears of the Kingdom in particular, series producer Eiji Aonuma and his team have shifted the paradigm of Zelda design towards open-endedness and player creativity (to a degree). These games were hugely popular, but – perhaps because of the accumulated cultural weight of the first three decades of Zelda games – I assumed that traditional Zelda would live on alongside this new breed, likely in smaller titles that harked back to its 2D roots of the series. .

It seems not. Introduce Echoes of wisdom in a video, Aonuma laid it on the line: “Here we wanted to create a new gameplay style that breaks the conventions of previous Legend of Zelda games with a top-down perspective,” he said. Nintendo isn’t done messing with its beloved franchise – or rather, it’s letting players mess with it and challenging its designers to keep up.

In the game, Princess Zelda can use a magical staff called the Tri Rod to create copies of objects, and even monsters, called Echoes. She can build stairs from bed frames, summon Moblins to fight for her, or create free-standing columns of water. In the video, Aonuma pointed out that the way combat or puzzle solutions play out will vary greatly from player to player depending on the Echoes they use. The Echo ability is Princess Zelda’s Ultra Hand; just like inside Tears of the Kingdomthe ability to brute force the game’s challenges, or step outside the usual Zelda ruleset to circumvent them, is baked into the game design and part of the fun.

Echoes of wisdom will be the first brand new Zelda game to release since Link’s open-world adventures shook up the series. Visually, it looks exactly like the 2019 remake of the 1993 classic Link’s awakening, but design-wise it feels like it belongs to a different, newer breed of Zelda games. Embracing creativity and player freedom now seems to be a core tenet of the series. Aonuma’s silent revolution continues; Zelda will never be the same again.